A friend recently posted on my Facebook wall Robert Locke’s misguided criticism of Libertarianism in The American Conservative magazine:
Libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
My rebuttal:
The difference between libertarianism and statism is the difference between peace and war. As Ludwig Von Mises wrote “A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.”
Let me now back up this statement by picking apart Robert Locke’s:
libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function
Selfishness does not go away when you replace economic power with political power. Bureaucrats are just as selfish as entrepreneurs. The important difference is that to the extent which we have a free market, people must act on their selfishness by providing goods an services which society VOLUNTARILY consumes. We are all slaves to the consumer. No such pressure exists on bureaucrats. To whatever extent economic activity is run by the state, people act upon their selfishness by bending the coercive hand of government to force people to buy their product, get direct subsidies, outlaw competition, etc.
Secondly, Locke seem to find a contradiction between altruism and libertarianism. You do not need to hold a gun to my head (taxes are collected under threat of violence), and filter my money through a den of theives for me to be altruistic. Were we allowed to keep more of our money, society would be MORE, not less, altruistic.
Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation.
False. The empirical evidence is overwhelming. The correlation between economic freedom and economic prosperity should have long ago put to rest all these collectivist ideas that keep rising from the grave. We have yet to see a society which is too free.
My favorite examples are the ones in which similar cultures adopted different economic policies: Estonia vs. Latvia & Lithuania, West Germany vs. East Germany, Hong Kong in the 80s vs. the rest of China in the 80s, Botswana vs. the rest of Africa. I also hesitate to mention Chile vs. the rest of S. America, because their relatively free economy was put into place by a murderous dictator and often deemed guilty by association.
You can also look at all former Soviet states and see an almost exact correlation between economic freedom and economic prosperity.
Secondly, I disagree completely with Locke’s criticism of priori theory. You need theory. Without theory, economics is just endless data that tells you nothing. The world is too big to isolate experiments the way a physicist does.
An example often cited by Murray Rothbard are prices in the 1920s. Without theory all you see are stable prices. Just data attributable to almost anything. Theory tells you that the incorporation of the electric grid into production increased efficiency which should have lowered prices, but at the same time, massively inflationary monetary policies put upward pressure on the dollar, weakening its purchasing power. Hence, prices were stable.